When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his ...slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed "Mississippi in Africa." In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.
This critical edition of Princess Fatima Massaquoi's memoirs begins with her birth in southern Sierra Leone, continues through her childhood in Liberia, moves on to Hamburg, Germany, where she lived ...and experienced the rise of the Nazi movement, and ends with her life in the United States.
Destiny and Race Moses, Wilson J; Crummell, Alexander
1992
eBook
A major 19th-century reformer and intellectual, Alexander Crummell was the first black American to receive a degree from Cambridge University. After working in Liberia, he founded the American Negro ...Academy. This volume of selected writings by Crummell aims to prompt a re-evaluation of his work.
Slaves to Racism is a unique cross-racial, cross cultural approach to racism from an insider/outsider viewpoint. Using numerous personal stories from the 1950s to today, from the American South and ...Midwest to Western Africa, the author displays the compulsive and repetitive nature of racism, its effect on both participant and victim, and how American prejudice and discrimination migrated to Africa with the creation of Liberia. The author is a marginal man who belongs to all of the groups involved. As an insider, he was privy to confidential racial and cultural viewpoints. As an outsider, his academic training allowed him to apply the principles of sociology and anthropology to what he observed. Although the book is based on academic theory, it is written in an engaging and understandable way that appeals to a mass audience. Through a variety of anecdotes and vignettes illustrating the persistence of ignorance among people who really know better, the reader will gain insights into the nature of racism and perhaps himself, as well, as he sees his own racial and cultural attitudes displayed. This account of the social and cultural forces that destroyed Liberia is based on social psychology how people think and act as a group. In every society and nation, while every individual may not exactly fit the mold, there are cultural similarities that lead to groupthink an essential element of national character.
In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable ...Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows members of a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.
Despite peace agreements, demobilization, and reintegration processes, the end of war does not automatically or necessarily make combatants abandon their wartime rebel networks. In Liberia such ...structures have lingered long after the civil war came to an end in 2003. Weak formal security institutions with a history of predatory behavior have contributed to the creation of an environment where informal initiatives for security and protection are called upon. In fragile postwar settings, former soldiers can be used as intimidators but have paradoxically reemerged as security providers, challenging our understanding of both the setting and the actors beyond the sphere of war. Based on original interview material and findings from fieldwork, Repurposed Rebels follows former rebel soldiers from the time of civil war to 2013. These actors have reemerged as "recycled" warriors in times of regional wars and crisis and as vigilantes and informal security providers for economic and political purposes. Through these actors, Mariam Bjarnesen examines the relevance of postwar rebel networks and ex-combatant identity in contemporary Liberia, with an eye to understanding the underlying aims of demobilization when reintegration is challenged. Bjarnesen argues that these ex-combatants have succeeded in reintegrating themselves due to, not despite, the fact that they have not been truly demobilized.
This paper discusses whether adopting the U.S. dollar as the sole legal tender could help Liberia, a postconflict economy, to boost growth and strengthen fiscal discipline. In view of the performance ...of exchange rate regimes in many countries and Liberia's own experience with dollarization, we conclude that Liberia should not adopt full dollarization for the following reasons: (i) the alleged benefits voiced by the proponents of dollarization, in terms of enhanced fiscal discipline and faster economic growth, are not supported by the empirical evidence; (ii) dollarization would increase the Liberian economy's vulnerability to external shocks and Liberia's social fragility; (iii) banks in fully dollarized economies face additional capitalization requirements that Liberian banks cannot meet at present; and (iv) dollarization would be costly in terms of real resources because of the loss of seigniorage.
Building on the first edition, this updated volume focuses on the personalities, from the founders of Liberia, to the soldiers who are responsible simultaneously for destruction and the hope of ...stability. Along with these people, various social and ethnic groups, political parties and labor movements, economic entities and natural resources are profiled in this updated work.
